Impacts of business process reengineering on organizational control.

Abstract

While the benefits of process integration in business reengineering have been enthusiastically publicized, the impacts on organizational control, e.g., the compression of responsibilities, have received little attention. Inadequate attention to these issues can result in reengineered systems that are exposed to excessive risks or reengineering attempts which are prematurely self-defeating as they contradict the underlying control philosophy. This research seeks to analyze how BPR has changed the controls within an organization. It is primarily motivated by three concerns: i. the lack of a theoretical framework within which the disparate control observations from the BPR literature can be examined and reconciled. ii. the lack of focused empirical research on organizational control within a reengineering context. Prior literature has been focusing on the principles, implementation issues, and the critical success factors for BPR. Research on the control impacts of BPR is limited and often explored only as a small part of a wider research focus, iii. the practical importance of organizational control for success in reengineering. Prior research in reengineering failures has pointed to the inappropriateness of specific control dimensions such as insensitive reward structure and incompatible shared values. A corresponding alignment in organizational control is required to sustain reengineering effectiveness.